Purchase Salvage: Readings from the Wreck here.
In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today.
Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live.
Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her other collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto’s poet laureate, and in 2021 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She lives in Toronto.
"In this insightful meditation on her formation as a colonial subject, Brand attends to the instrumentality of the novel and the regime of the aesthetic in the project of empire . . . A life can be “destroyed” by books, Brand observes . . . A life also can be remade by books."
-Saidiya Hartman
